First of all, please use the search function, this questions has been answer at least once..

but to make it a little less painful:
KDE4.0 probably won't get into portage, but you'll have access to the ebuilds on the kde-overlay.

I did search, but just not too hard. Of course KDE will make it into portage eventually. I stay away from anything which requires overlay, so I suppose I'll be staying away from KDE 4 for a while unfortunately..

Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2008 12:32 pm Post subject: Will KDE 4.0 get in the portage tree any time soon?

Now that the 4.0 code freeze was done and the 4.0 release event is days away, I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I know it would probably show up in the kde overlay pretty soon, but I'd probably wait until the ebuilds are stabilized and make it into the portage tree, if that would happen in the following couple of months or so.

this not just another minor upgrade (or even one of those new patch-levels..), we are talking about a X.0.0 release, and they tend to have far more problems than a the average minor upgrade (for the understanding: 3.4 to 3.5 is a minor upgrade, 3.5.7 to 3.5.8 is a patch-level upgrade).

And - that's where the problem is - not all parts have been ported to KDE4 yet - PIM will get into 4.1. So IIRC the gentoo devs did not want to release something like this - a half finished DE - onto the users.

Sorry for my naiveness, but isn't this what the testing branch is for? To have software like KDE4.0?

Tetsting is for fairly usable stuff, without (major) known and unknown issues. KDE 4 is in large parts a whole rewrite and version 4.0 is a) missing functionality you're used to from KDE 3.5 as there was no time improve or (re-)implement everything useful, but the foundations were laid for a richer application stack for the years to come and b) is dedicated to developers, early adopters, enthusiasts - but not the ordinary user. It's to fresh and not stable enough to go into testing._________________Please make sure that you have searched for an answer to a question after reading all the relevant docs.

KDE4 contains all aplications, the only thing about it is that some of them are still the old ones, not using the new cool features, and believe me, most of apps won't be untill KDE 4.2 (for example Kopete or KOffice).

If you want to keep KDE out of portage until KDE 4.2 then you will loose a huge amount of users. KDE 3.5 is going to be deprecated very soon, I don't see any posibility supporting both KDE 4 and KDE 3.5 properly.

KDE4 contains all aplications, the only thing about it is that some of them are still the old ones, not using the new cool features, and believe me, most of apps won't be untill KDE 4.2 (for example Kopete or KOffice).

Right, there's a lot of hidden potential, but 4.0 won't be that impressive at all for the average user. Plus there's no point in migrating unless you need any new features.

Quote:

If you want to keep KDE out of portage until KDE 4.2 then you will loose a huge amount of users.

No. If you want to migrate just for the coolness or the sake of migrating, you can use overlays. Portage devs have already a lot of work maintaining stable software, they don't need to bite their own asses by inserting another couple of thousands of unstable new ebuilds that will require continuous attention to be able to compile. Binary distros are another matter: they just compile one time and everything is right. But a source distro is not the same, you need to understand that.

Quote:

KDE 3.5 is going to be deprecated very soon

No!

I don't know what your sources are. But kde 3.x has still a long life (probably many years). It will still be supported by the kde team, and security fixes will be applied. KDE4 is nowhere near a complete nor usable status for anything serious. If you want to play with it in your home, that's ok, but kde4 can't be used for anything serious (i.e. real work, corporate use, etc).

Sure that the main focus is going to be kde4, no doubt about that. But that doesn't automatically render kde3.x unsupported._________________Gentoo Handbook | My website

Amongst other things it also states, that KDE3 will be sticking around for at least a few years. And that is main to larger institution, who don't want to do any migration - esp not to a unstable product as KDE4 is right now!

Hmmm ... I've seen over the years much more unstable stuff, like broken system tools, in testing than an optional KDE4. So I can't really understand why not put it into portage. Mask it maybe if you think it will really "eat your children" (TM). But I always thought gentoo is for experienced users and all about choice?! Nobody wants to see it in stable or even think about making it the default, but how should it mature if testers wait for it appearing in "testing"? I know testing is for testing ebuilds ... but, hey, KDE4 had such a difficult birth, so give it some love !

I could understand KDE devs becoming a little bit frustrated if now, that they finally released something after all that criticism, distributors make it more difficult than necessary for voluntary testers.

Hmmm ... I've seen over the years much more unstable stuff, like broken system tools, in testing than an optional KDE4. So I can't really understand why not put it into portage. Mask it maybe if you think it will really "eat your children" (TM). But I always thought gentoo is for experienced users and all about choice?! Nobody wants to see it in stable or even think about making it the default, but how should it mature if testers wait for it appearing in "testing"? I know testing is for testing ebuilds ... but, hey, KDE4 had such a difficult birth, so give it some love !

Yes, it's all about choice. You have the choice to use an overlay. If you aren't experienced enough to maintain an overlay you will not be experienced enough to deal with the kde4 compilation issues.

We are not talking about ~arch stuff. We are talking about packages that, sometimes, do not even compile, and need continual care and patching. If you are not willing to do the work yourlsef, you can urge the gentoo devs to do that work for you, after all, they are doing it for free. To maintain kde4 would require a lot of extra work, it is not just as easy as to pick random ebuilds and drop them into portage. Ebuilds need maintainers, are you willing to do the work?

This is just my opinion, of course. I don't really care if kde4 gets into gentoo or not, but since we lack dev power on some other places (more important places, in my opinion, than testing eyecandyware), my vote would be against including it in portage. Though thinking about it, I think it wouldn't really matter. Each dev choose to maintain the apps s/he is interested in. Probably, there are just not enough gentoo devs interested in kde4, or they do, but they have other -higher- priorities.

EDIT: I don't think this makes it harder for voluntary testers at all. Gentoo has had kde4 ebuilds around since kde4 was an spermatozoon. And instructions and community support has been around for ages. Such is the gentoo nature, do it yourself, and ask the community if something fails. It is impossible to provide official support because it's been a very dynamic entity that changed everyday. That is where community, lists, forums and irc comes handy. Moving the ebuilds that are into an overlay into portage would help no one, plus it would create lots of issues and problems for people that do not care at all about kde4, at least at the current state of things (yes, there are people that do not care at all about it)._________________Gentoo Handbook | My website

If you aren't experienced enough to maintain an overlay you will not be experienced enough to deal with the kde4 compilation issues.

Calm down, why so aggresive? I did compile my SVN-KDE4 compilations by myself in the beginning. Hell, I did compile KDE pre1 versions myself. I make bug reports, provide patches if I can, I try to help others in the forums and on mailing lists. But I'm no developer. I'ld like to keep my system as clean as possible, and from my experience overlays cause more problems then official portage ebuilds, since they are not always in sync and you need to take care not to run into dependency problems.

i92guboj wrote:

We are not talking about ~arch stuff. We are talking about packages that, sometimes, do not even compile, and need continual care and patching.

I don't know what you are talking about. I'm talking about official released KDE4.x packages.

Hmmm ... I've seen over the years much more unstable stuff, like broken system tools, in testing than an optional KDE4. So I can't really understand why not put it into portage.

KDE is a very large system. Just look at all the split ebuilds there are. This is not a simple "system tool". It's a complex desktop environment that has many dependencies and also many things that depend on it. All that needs to be tested first. From my understanding, the KDE4 overlay that is in unsupported was a test bed for the new KDE4 technology and their ebuilds. The ebuilds cannot go into portage until the official release of 4.0.0 which is tomorrow. I heard that the devs want the ebuilds in portage when 4.0.0 is officially released, or as close to it as possible. So, no fear, it will be there. The KDE4 ebuilds in the overlay are brilliant, so use them if you want it now. Really, they are. That overlay is maintained by some of the Gentoo KDE devs. So they exist, and so they they will be in portage when they are allowed to be there as per agreement with the KDE Developers. All KDE distributors must follow their rules, even though some don't, they should and the Gentoo KDE team follows the rules. I don't know why this was made into a big deal. :S People need to calm down and take a deep breath and stop utter speculation.

I don't know what you are talking about. I'm talking about official released KDE4.x packages.

In the 4.0.0 tag on svn, that code is a little rough and there are patches that are needed to fix some bugs. I had the 4.0.0 tag compiled and installed and I helped the KDE devs with some of the bugs I found. Most were fixed in branch. I hope the Gentoo devs make some patches based on branch, because some bugs are noticeable.

If you aren't experienced enough to maintain an overlay you will not be experienced enough to deal with the kde4 compilation issues.

Calm down, why so aggresive?

I don't see anything aggressive on that words. At least, that was not my intention. I was just stating something that I believe it is true. And I also explained why I think that merging these packages into portage would not work. There might be simply no one willing to take responsibility over such a huge task.

KDE4 is broken in many way, starting with xinerama and continuing with broken functionality in general. If there was enough devs to accomplish the task, then it would be nice to have it in portage, but even then I would just mask (not just keyword) it until it is ready. And with that in mind, I'd rather have it in an ebuild.

As I stated above, these are just my thought and opinions. I might be certain on some things, and completely wrong on many others. But one thing is for sure: I am far from feeling angry about this (or any other thing, by the way). Maybe I just lack the poetic skills or my English is not good enough to paint this or that shade on the picture of the words.

EDIT: StifflerStealth described what I meant in the other post. So, no need to repeat it. It is "not that simple" (TM) to get kde4 working. And it is certainly not ready for daily usage. E17 was removed from the tree time ago for the same reason. I don't see why kde4 should get any additional priviledges. The case is mostly the same. I am a KDE lover (well, maybe not the whole kde concept, but I love lots of things about kde), but kde4 is simply not ready. This doesn't mean that I don't recognise the hard work the devs did. I think kde4 must be made available to the public, and I think that releasing is a good thing, but that has nothing to do with this discussion at all, under my point of view._________________Gentoo Handbook | My website